I am going to be putting in a few thousand feet of fence and before I do I want to make sure I get it right. I will be fencing off some pastures and a yard around the barn for primarily a couple horses but possibly with some sheep or goats and maybe an odd steer as well. My plan right now is to use coated high tensile wire, with 7 wires, the first 5 6" apart and the top 2 12" apart with 2 or 3 of the wires insulated for electrification (top, 30", and maybe bottom). Round 5" wood posts, 6" on the ends and corners. Does this make sense?
How far apart on the posts? Can I go 25' on them? Do I have to brace the corners or if I embed them in concrete is that enough? I am going 3' down on the corners and ends, maybe 2' down on the line posts.
Talk to the fence supplier - they'll have specs on post spacing but I've seen coated high tensile with 25-30 foot spacing. Re the corner posts you will absolutely have to brace them or over time they will start leaning in and you'll be retensioning all the time. (Even telephone poles that go down 8 feet get braced with guy wires). For the corners you just put another set of posts on either side of the corner post about 8 feet away. You run a pole from the top of each post to the coner post. THEN you run a diagonal wire brace from the bottom of the corner post to the top of each line post and tension it. You need to do that on each corner post or where the fence terminates (like at a gate opening). High tensil fence exerts a LOT of constant pressure so they need to be braced pretty well. Only way I've ever seen around this is to make the corners in a large radius and put post spacing about 8 feet apart. I think bracing is a lot less work.
I was told you would need minimum 10 guage wire for livestock. I just installed 1300' of fence mostly for privacy it was the 9 paige high tensile wire which is 49" high. My 6" dia. cedar posts are set at 10' apart and the corners and gate have the typical bracing with a post set at a 45 deg. angle. It took just 3 days to dig holes and install posts and wire. We didn't use any cement at all. Just dug the holes and back filled with the sand.
Most of the time I've seen bracing the opposite of that... with the brace connected to the top of the corner and the bottom of the 2nd post. They usually use a 2x board for the brace as well. Is either method fine or is one better than the other? Thanks.
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